


A Sky Full of Stars

by seperis



Category: Smallville
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-08-31
Updated: 2004-08-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 07:19:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3241136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seperis/pseuds/seperis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He'll never look at the stars and see them like that again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Sky Full of Stars

He'll never look at the stars and see them like that again.

"It's not really a star, you know."

Clark sees gas giants and twists of red-gold-green bending geometry in ways that science hasn't caught up with enough to explain. It's the way his eyes interpret energy in space, bright wraps of gamma and pulse of radio, ultraviolet and infrared. He can see farther every day. 

Lex is warm at his side. He's right. It's a meteorite, a bright, fast burn in the atmosphere, a thousand million times a day, not that Clark's counted or anything. It's old hat, no news, nothing he's never seen, maybe, but this one is with Lex and that's anything but old hat and anything but ordinary.

"I know."

They're on a blanket...in the grass...in the barn...but then it could have been anywhere at all. It could have been the night Clark came home and found Lex on his doorstep, immaculate suit and dustless shoes, long fingers pressed to dark wood, bitten nails from sharp, worrying teeth. A tiny imperfection in a sea of clean order, his eyes clung to the reddened tips, and he began to smile.

It could have been when Lex stood up and dusted clean trousers of imaginary dirt and glanced up at the sky. "Did you see that?"

"What would you wish for?" Lex shifts against the blanket--the floor--the porch--and Clark grins as he watches the sky, wide and dark, stretched cloudlessly over barren fields. The heat of summer has never been so thick, and Clark thinks drowsily that he's never been more content.

"Help people. Make the world better. Rain."

"Practical of you." Lex shifts again, the barely audible scrape of bitten nails on soft wool, a hiss that no one else could ever hear. A special part of Lex that only Clark will ever be able to know.

"What would you wish for?"

Lex's eyes widen, and Clark looks up, focusing on whitebright heat, a pure second, dazzling and blinding, and he never hears Lex's answer. When he closes his eyes, he makes a wish, the clear white burned into the lids.

Clark closed his eyes and made a wish when he sees a star fall.

*****

He'll never see another falling star and not remember.

"You motherfucking bastard. Get the hell off of my property!"

He thinks that the dark hides too much, or maybe not enough. Tall and powerful and ridiculous in primary reds and blues. He never sees Clark anymore, not wrapped like a costume designer's acid trip, never thinks of pretty boys and summer fields under dark skies. The habit of distrust shifting to the instinct of hate with no effort at all.

They stare at each other across a space of feet and time and nothing at all, beneath the canopy of a perfect, clear night under a sky full of stars. 

 On the roof of a rundown building on the outskirts of Metropolis...a burning laboratory in eastern Spain...a field in the middle of fucking nowhere, and his plans were in ruins around him. Superman was like Lionel; he always knew the leverage of hurt, what it took to do the damage. Clark wasn't the first, but he did it the best.

It shouldn't hurt anymore, but it always, always did.

"I'll kill you if it's the last thing I ever do, you son of a bitch." He forgot how to forgive years ago. Superman takes off into the sky with the first flash of redbluewhite light in the distance, hovering above him in the velvet night. Impossibly dark eyes stare back at him from a solemn face that never changes, nothing changes, especially them.

He watches Superman watch him, as bright and brilliant as a falling star, and for a second, he sees a boy with closed eyes beside him on a scratchy blanket who asked what he would wish for, dark curling hair and a stretch of flannel and golden skin against his side. He sees himself not-touch with one upraised hand, hovering over Clark's cheek, and he remembers what he said.

Lex closed his eyes and made a wish.


End file.
